The enduring appeal of theater isn’t about whiz-bang special effects. Audiences spanning cultures and epochs are drawn to the art form for something much simpler: the thrill of a good story so well told that it piques the strength, however dormant, of our own imaginations. It makes us feel like children again.

“The Last Tiger in Haiti,” a world premiere by Jeff Augustin that opened Friday, Oct. 21, at Berkeley Rep, taps into that age-old power with spunk, humor and grace. The play’s five restaveks — Haitian children sold into servitude by their impoverished parents and in the play promised freedom on their 18th birthdays — don’t just tell great stories, using Haiti’s “Krik? Krak!” call-and-response tradition. The ritualized manner in which they compete to be the best storyteller of the bunch — a post hitherto firmly held by Max (Andy Lucien), the eldest, who’s on the eve of his freedom — also makes for a great ur-story, so finely drawn is the web of relationships among the group.

It doesn’t seem like Joseph (Reggie D. White) could take up the mantle, despite some storytelling prowess, after Max departs; all swagger and cynicism, he seems unready for the broader responsibilities of leadership in their patchwork tent. But it certainly couldn’t be Emmanuel (Clinton Roane), whose narrative powers are so poor — he delivers his cliches in singsong, using the gestures of a 19th century melodrama actor — that the others, exasperated, jump in to help him flesh out his characters, almost like they’re all in a creative writing workshop. Laurie (Jasmine St. Clair) is peerless as a storyteller — her rendering of the traditional Haitian tale “The Girl and the Orange Tree” is a highlight of the play — but, now that she has a boyfriend, she already has a foot out the tent’s makeshift door. And Rose (Brittany Bellizeare) is simply too young, but she’s already catching up to the others with alacrity, largely in an effort to do whatever she can to persuade her beloved Max, a doting older-brother figure, not to leave.

As hellish as the children’s lives are — slaving all day for scant food; battling the self-loathing that comes with abandonment; fearing beatings or worse from Mister, their master, should they simply venture out of their tent at night to pee in the bushes — they’re also rich in narrative, in artistry, in connection to a mystical world of ghosts and spirits. When, in the middle of a story, the back curtain of their tent rustles a little too forcefully for a windless night, you can’t help but believe that one of the folkloric figures from the tale is about to materialize.

What materializes instead, between the show’s two acts, is a well-appointed apartment in Miami Beach, set 15 years later, when Rose and Max meet again for the first time. Rose has become a successful author — still a storyteller, but of a very, very different kind, Max repeatedly points out — while Max has worked as a prostitute.

The postmodernist impulse in this act is admirable. It’s not just Max and Rose interrogating the self-serving narratives each other has constructed about the past, but also Augustin interrogating the conceit of his own first act and more broadly the way the U.S. talks about developing countries. But as written, it drives clunkily toward the revelation of a secret, and under Joshua Kahan Brody’s direction, Lucien and Bellizeare perform at half-staff.

Still, like the budding raconteurs in its first act, this young play has the potential to deserve a second look.